Nevertheless, sometimes one likes to escape from the thing one loves,
and there are hours when the gay voices of Luxor fatigue the ears, when
one desires a great calm. Then there are silent voices that summon
one across the river, when the dawn is breaking over the hills of
the Arabian desert, or when the sun is declining toward the Libyan
mountains--voices issuing from lips of stone, from the twilight of
sanctuaries, from the depths of rock-hewn tombs.
The peace of the plain of Thebes in the early morning is very rare and
very exquisite. It is not the peace of the desert, but rather, perhaps,
the peace of the prairie--an atmosphere tender, delicately thrilling,
softly bright, hopeful in its gleaming calm. Often and often have I left
the _Loulia_ very early moored against the long sand islet that faces
Luxor when the Nile has not subsided, I have rowed across the quiet
water that divided me from the western bank, and, with a happy heart, I
have entered into the lovely peace of the great spaces that stretch from
the Colossi of Memnon to the Nile, to the mountains, southward toward
Armant, northward to Kerekten, to Danfik, to Gueziret-Meteira. Think of
the color of young clover, of young barley, of young wheat; think of
the timbre of the reed flute’s voice, thin, clear, and frail with the
frailty of dewdrops; think of the torrents of spring rushing through the
veins of a great, wide land, and growing almost still at last on their
journey. Spring, you will say, perhaps, and high Nile not yet subsided!
But Egypt is the favored land of a spring that is already alert at the
end of November, and in December is pushing forth its green. The Nile
has sunk away from the feet of the Colossi that it has bathed through
many days. It has freed the plain to the fellaheen, though still
it keeps my island in its clasp. And Hapi, or Kam-wra, the “Great
Extender,” and Ra, have made this wonderful spring to bloom on the dark
earth before the Christian’s Christmas.
What a pastoral it is, this plain of Thebes, in the dawn of day! Think
of the reed flute, I have said, not because you will hear it, as you
ride toward the mountains, but because its voice would be utterly in
place here, in this arcady of Egypt, playing no tarantella, but one of
those songs, half bird-like, and half sadly, mysteriously human, which
come from the soul of the East. Instead of it, you may catch distant
cries from the bank of the river, where the shadoof-man toils, lifting
ever the water and his voice, the one to earth, the other, it seems, to
sky; and the creaking lay of the water-wheel, which pervades Upper Egypt
like an atmosphere, and which, though perhaps at first it irritates, at
last seems to you the sound of the soul of the river, of the sunshine,
and the soil.
Much of the land looks painted. So flat is it, so young are the growing
crops, that they are like a coating of green paint spread over a mighty
canvas. But the doura rises higher than the heads of the naked children
who stand among it to watch you canter past. And in the far distance
you see dim groups of trees--sycamores and acacias, tamarisks and palms.
Beyond them is the very heart of this “land of sand and ruins and gold”;
Medinet-Abu, the Ramesseum, Deir-el Medinet, Kurna, Deir-el-Bahari, the
tombs of the kings, the tombs of the queens and of the princes. In the
strip of bare land at the foot of those hard, and yet poetic mountains,
have been dug up treasures the fame of which has gone to the ends of the
world. But this plain, where the fellaheen are stooping to the soil, and
the women are carrying the water-jars, and the children are playing in
the doura, and the oxen and the camels are working with ploughs that
look like relics of far-off days, is the possession of the two great
presiding beings whom you see from an enormous distance, the Colossi of
Memnon. Amenhotep III. put them where they are. So we are told. But in
this early morning it is not possible to think of them as being brought
to any place. Seated, the one beside the other, facing the Nile and the
home of the rising sun, their immense aspect of patience suggests will,
calmly, steadily exercised, suggests choice; that, for some reason, as
yet unknown, they chose to come to this plain, that they choose solemnly
to remain there, waiting, while the harvests grow and are gathered about
their feet, while the Nile rises and subsides, while the years and
the generations come, like the harvests, and are stored away in the
granaries of the past. Their calm broods over this plain, gives to it
a personal atmosphere which sets it quite apart from every other flat
space of the world. There is no place that I know on the earth which has
the peculiar, bright, ineffable calm of the plain of these Colossi. It
takes you into its breast, and you lie there in the growing sunshine
almost as if you were a child laid in the lap of one of them. That
legend of the singing at dawn of the “vocal Memnon,” how could it have
arisen? How could such calmness sing, such patience ever find a voice?
Unlike the Sphinx, which becomes ever more impressive as you draw near
to it, and is most impressive when you sit almost at its feet, the
Colossi lose in personality as you approach them and can see how they
have been defaced.
From afar one feels their minds, their strange, unearthly temperaments
commanding this pastoral. When you are beside them, this feeling
disappears. Their features are gone, and though in their attitudes
there is power, and there is something that awakens awe, they are more
wonderful as a far-off feature of the plain. They gain in grandeur from
the night in strangeness from the moonrise, perhaps specially when the
Nile comes to their feet. More than three thousand years old, they look
less eternal than the Sphinx. Like them, the Sphinx is waiting, but with
a greater purpose. The Sphinx reduces man really to nothingness. The
Colossi leave him some remnants of individuality. One can conceive of
Strabo and AElius Gallus, of Hadrian and Sabina, of others who came
over the sunlit land to hear the unearthly song in the dawn, being of
some--not much, but still of some--importance here. Before the Sphinx
no one is important. But in the distance of the plain the Colossi shed
a real magic of calm and solemn personality, and subtly seem to mingle
their spirit with the flat, green world, so wide, so still, so fecund,
and so peaceful; with the soft airs that are surely scented with an
eternal springtime, and with the light that the morning rains down on
wheat and clover, on Indian corn and barley, and on brown men laboring,
who, perhaps, from the patience of the Colossi in repose have drawn a
patience in labor that has in it something not less sublime.
From the Colossi one goes onward toward the trees and the mountains, and
very soon one comes to the edge of that strange and fascinating strip of
barren land which is strewn with temples and honeycombed with tombs. The
sun burns down on it. The heat seems thrown back upon it by the wall of
tawny mountains that bounds it on the west. It is dusty, it is arid; it
is haunted by swarms of flies, by the guardians of the ruins, and by men
and boys trying to sell enormous scarabs and necklaces and amulets, made
yesterday, and the day before, in the manufactory of Kurna. From many
points it looks not unlike a strangely prolonged rubbish-heap in which
busy giants have been digging with huge spades, making mounds and pits,
caverns and trenches, piling up here a monstrous heap of stones, casting
down there a mighty statue. But how it fascinates! Of curse one knows
what it means. One knows that on this strip of land Naville dug out at
Deir-el-Bahari the temple of Mentu-hotep, and discovered later, in her
shrine, Hathor, the cow-goddess, with the lotus-plants streaming from
her sacred forehead to her feet; that long before him Mariette here
brought to the light at Drah-abu’l-Neggah the treasures of kings of
the twelfth and thirteenth dynasties; that at the foot of those
tiger-colored precipices Theodore M. Davis the American found the
sepulcher of Queen Hatshepsu, the Queen Elizabeth of the old Egyptian
world, and, later, the tomb of Yuaa and Thuaa, the parents of Queen
Thiy, containing mummy-cases covered with gold, jars of oil and wine,
gold, silver, and alabaster boxes, a bed decorated with gilded ivory a
chair with gilded plaster reliefs, chairs of state, and a chariot; that
here Maspero, Victor Loret, Brugsch Bey, and other patient workers gave
to the world tombs that had been hidden and unknown for centuries; that
there to the north is the temple of Kurna, and over there the Ramesseum;
that those rows of little pillars close under the mountain, and looking
strangely modern, are the pillars of Hatshepsu’s temple, which bears
upon its walls the pictures of the expedition to the historic land of
Punt; that the kings were buried there, and there the queens and the
princes of the vanished dynasties; that beyond to the west is the temple
of Deir-el-Medinet with its judgment of the dead; that here by the
native village is Medinet-Abu. One knows that, and so the imagination is
awake, ready to paint the lily and to gild the beaten gold. But even
if one did not know, I think one would be fascinated. This turmoil of
sun-baked earth and rock, grey, yellow, pink, orange, and red, awakens
the curiosity, summons the love of the strange, suggests that it holds
secrets to charm the souls of men.
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